Thursday, August 28, 2008

SVG in KDE

"Commitment" is one of the words that have never been used in this blog. Which is pretty impressive given that I've managed to use such words as sheep, llamas, raspberries, ninjas, donkeys, crack or woodchuck quite extensively (especially impressive in a technology centric blog).

That's because commitment implies that whatever it is one is committed to plays an important role in their life. It's a word that goes beyond the paper or the medium on which it was written. It enters the cold reality that surrounds us.

But today is all about commitment. It's about commitment that KDE made to a technology broadly refereed to as Scalable Vector Graphics. I took some time off this week and came to Germany where I talked about usage of SVG in KDE.

The paper about, what I like to call, the Freedom of Beauty, is available here:

https://www.svgopen.org/2008/papers/104-SVG_in_KDE/

It talks about the history of SVG in KDE, the rendering model used by KDE, it lists ways in which we use SVG and finally shows some problems which have been exposed by such diverse usage of SVG in a desktop environment. Please read it if you're interested in KDE or SVG.

Hopefully this paper marks a start of a more proactive role KDE is going to be playing in shaping of the SVG standard.

7 comments:

scroogie said...

This was a good read, thank you. I'm very impressed by the diffusion curves. Especially combined with edge detection it seems to be great. The dolphin picture vectorisation! Really interesting.

Jeff Schiller said...

"One of the major features missing from SVG is the ability to interpolate paths."

The SVG spec does say you can interpolate paths if the starting and ending paths have exactly the same number of segments and commands

http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile12/paths.html#PathDataAnimation

I agree that this is very limiting though.

Do you think there will be module proposals made by Qt/KDE/Nokia for SVG Full 1.2 ?

elvis said...

Oh boy, diffusion curves in SVG would be awesome, and such a good fit! The other suggestions make sense too.

Unknown said...

Hi Zack,

I attended your presentation at the SVG Open and I was very impressed.

I'd like to thank you very much for taking the time to come to Nuremberg and present - and hopefully get some ideas about what other people are doing in SVG.

I think the commitment of KDE to SVG is remarkable - I was aware that KDE was using SVG, but until your presentation I did not realize that it is really used in such a big way in KDE4 now.

The SVG working group would very much welcome if the KDE community would be more involved in the SVG standards development. It would be great if some of the extensions you KDE guys developed could be included in the SVG standard so they could be more widely used on the web.

Thanks again - you guys are doing a great job! And it looks beautiful!

Anonymous said...

This was a good read, thank you. I'm very impressed by the diffusion curves. Especially combined with edge detection it seems to be great. The dolphin picture vectorisation! Really interesting.

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SVG Open said...

Will you not be there at SVG Open 2009? I can't find you on the list of presentations. Too bad as it would really be great to hear about advances in SVG in KDE and about advances in Gallium 3D support for SVG.